The era of corporate AI theater is ending. A recent Wharton Human-AI Research and GBK Collective study finds that 82% of enterprise leaders use generative AI at least weekly, and 46% use it daily. That is no longer experimentation.

Yet McKinsey’s 2025 state of AI survey shows a stubborn gap between broad usage and real scale, with many companies still stuck in pilots and isolated use cases. The next corporate divide won’t be between firms that “have AI” and firms that don’t. It will be between firms that wire AI into workflows, incentives, and management routines, and firms that keep mistaking access for transformation.

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